It’s not a bird or a plane, and probably not an alien spaceship, although the jury’s still deliberating that one. Some astronomers have proposed that an oddly-shaped object that recently passed through our Solar System could be an alien artifact. We consider the E.T. explanation for ‘Oumuamua, but also other reasons asteroids are invigorating our imagination. Are these orbiting rocks key to our future as a spacefaring species?

Find out why traditional incentives for human exploration of space – such as political rivalry –aren’t igniting our rockets the way they once did, but why the potentially trillions of dollars to be made mining asteroids might.

These small bodies may also hold the key to our ancient past: the New Horizons flyby of Thule in early 2019 will provide an historic look at a distant Kuiper belt object, and provide clues about the formation of the Solar System.

Big Picture Science / ‘Oumuamua Or…?click to listen (trt 4:26)
Click above to listen to part 4 of Space Rocks!, featuring Avi Loeb, professor of Science at Harvard and chair of the Department of Astronomy, suggesting that an extra-solar object named ‘Oumuamua may not be either asteroid nor comet, but instead an alien artifact.

Big Picture Science / Ultima Thuleclick to listen (trt 7:16)
Click above to listen to part 3 of Space Rocks!, featuring Mark Showalter, planetary scientist and Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute and a member of the New Horizons team, looking forward to the January 1, 2019 New Horizons flyby of the trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt object officially designated as 2014 MU69, but better known by its nickname, Ultima Thule.

Big Picture Science / Space Explorationclick to listen (trt 9:52)
Click above to listen to part 1 of Space Rocks!, featuring Roger Launius, Former associate director of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian and chief historian for NASA, recounting the space race of the 1960s and subsequent wane of public interest in space exploration.

Climate change isn’t happening. Vaccines make you sick. When it comes to threats to public or environmental health, a surprisingly large fraction of the population still denies the consensus of scientific evidence. But it’s not the first time – many people long resisted the evidentiary link between HIV and AIDS and smoking with lung cancer.

There’s a sense that science denialism is on the rise. It prompted a gathering of scientists and historians in New York City to discuss the problem, which included a debate on the usefulness of the word “denial” itself. Big Picture Science was there. We report from the Science Denial symposium held jointly by the New York Academy of Sciences and Rutgers Global Health Institute.

Find out why so many people dig in their heels and distrust scientific findings. Plus, the techniques wielded by special interest groups to dispute some inconvenient truths. We also hear how simply stating more facts may be the wrong approach to combating scientific resistance.